Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker (3 June 1906-12 April 1975) was an American-born French entertainer, activist, and French Resistance agent. She gained worldwide fame as a burlesque dancer and as an icon of the Jazz Age and the 1920s, and she took part in the struggle against the German occupation of France during World War II and also played a leadership role in the Civil Rights movement.

Biography
Freda Josephine McDonald was born in St. Louis, Missouri on 3 June 1906, the daughter of vaudeville performers. By the age of 12, she left school to provide for herself and her poor family, becoming a waitress at 13 before becoming a street corner dancer. At the age of 15, she took part in her first vaudeville show, and she moved to Paris in 1925 at the age of 19, becoming an instant success for her erotic dancing, and for appearing partially nude onstage. She became the most successful American entertainer working in France, and, after failing to bring her success back to America, she dropped her US citizenship and became a French citizen in 1937. During World War II, she worked with the French Resistance to supply resistance members with visas, and she wrote notes about airfields, harbors, and German troop concentrations in the west of France with invisible ink on her sheet music. After the war, she was awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Legion d'Honneur by former resistance laeder Charles de Gaulle. She continued to be one of Paris' preeminent entertainers, and, during the 1950s, she began to actively oppose segregation back in the United States. She was accused of communist sympathies by the press, leading to her leaving the USA for ten years; in 1966, she sang in Havana, Cuba at the 7th anniversary celebrations of the Cuban Revolution. In 1963, she spoke at the March on Washington at the side of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Coretta Scott King even approached Baker about taking over the Civil Rights movement after King's assassination in 1968. However, Baker wanted to take care of her children, and she died back in Paris in 1975 at the age of 68.